Archive for April, 2014

Do people have a right to be concerned about their overall privacy in a tech savvy society?

Well, I guess that it all depends on who you ask since the conscientious proprietors who have lots of money to share with certain tech companies, and who also want to sell us their products, seem to feel that they should have full access to our secret thoughts that are quite often revealed by our innocent internet searches and by our private text messages and by our one on one telephone conversations that are supposed to be private, but that some of us students of history have always known weren’t as private as some people might have initially thought since certain individuals that occupy certain government offices delight in reading the private love letters of others while looking over their intimate photos that are privately stored inside their computers and also inside their individually purchased cell phones that I might add were paid for through hard labor and without government subsidies, which means that these devices should be off-limits since the end user did not willingly accept them as a gift from a government entity and since they were purchased for private personal use and not for use by the government.

However, unauthorized prying eyes continue to invade the private space of the end user and many of us have always known deep down inside that there was a certain level of perverse-surveillance that was taking place throughout the world since the kind of disturbed minds that secretly recorded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was making love to his wife don’t often go away since history has taught us that they only get worse and worse as the technology gets better and better, which is why I’m constantly reminded of a former acquaintance that used to live in Romania under Communist rule.

The former acquaintance that I’m reminded of and that I haven’t seen in well over ten plus years told me over coffee one day that she left Romania because she couldn’t take the snooping and the deliberate intrusions into personal lives anymore and because she also couldn’t take the blatant harassment that seemed to spring up at every turn. She also told me that the same thing was taking place in my country right underneath everyone’s noses and that the soap operas and that the video games and that the loud music and that the incessant celebrity scandals had blinded the vast majority of Americans to the fact that they were being watched by their government just like she was being watched by the Romanian government when she lived under Communist circumstances.

I guess being called to the police station one morning and interrogated for up to five hours while another woman kept staring at her naked body while comparing it to hers since the authorities had intercepted and read some private love letters that she had written to a bank official that was her boyfriend at the time and that she was madly in love with, which shouldn’t have been anyone else’s business, will make one acutely aware whenever a certain level of surveillance is being used against those that are not aware.

The same woman that endured the five hour interrogation at the police station absolutely refused to get a cell phone and openly stated that before long the vast majority of payphones would start to disappear, so everyone would be forced to buy a cell phone or a GPS locator that would tell the governments of the world and the individual tech companies where we are at all times. I didn’t believe her at first until the payphones started to disappear and until the Smartphones were able to give us end users directions by using our precise location. The same woman said that the airports would one day have machines that could look underneath our clothes and that would be able to determine the exact dimensions of our genitalia, which I found hard to believe until the machines started to show up at various American airports.

My former acquaintance also stated that the Romanian government had insisted on bringing her in and asking her about the sexually explicit things that she had written in the love letters because they wanted to get to know her on an intimate level and because they wanted to photograph her. She also stated that the kind of disturbed minds that had opened her mail and that had read her private love letters and that were carrying out the acts of perverse-surveillance had actually thought that it was a matter of Romanian National Security to ask her what kinds of thoughts were going through her mind while she was in the intimate positions that she had secretly described in the love letters. The Romanian officials also wanted to know how many times she had climaxed and whether or not she preferred a gentleman that was well endowed.

The lead interrogator at the police station who had neatly placed all of the love letters on an empty table that was only a few inches away from my friend was a feisty woman that she later described as a Nazi-Demon after stating that the woman kept assuring her that there was nothing to worry about and that they were just concerned for her safety, however, my friend got wise to the surveillance tactic and she crossed through an open fence and never looked back because she knew that they were gathering information that would be used against her in some way since there were a number of young boys that lived in her neighborhood and that they could falsely accuse her of sexually abusing since she was quite experienced in the area of sex.

My friend who will remain nameless never even got to say goodbye to her parents because she left just as soon as she walked out of the police station since she knew that she was in danger.

Are we also in danger since people that we don’t know are assuming that they know us and that they can predict our present and future behavior and that they know what’s best for us and that we can’t live without their products and that they must protect us by spying on every aspect of our lives?

We must ask ourselves the aforementioned questions if we are to be seen as functioning human beings that have a right to self-determination, and if we want to make our own consumer related decisions without being prompted to buy a certain product because ads are following us to various internet sites.